How can I monetize insurance leads?

Figured this looked like the best subforum to post this in.

I setup a lead gen site for a family member a while back thinking to help give him a financial boost with maybe a few dozen health and life insurance local leads each month.

The city specific long tails are ranked at the top which is great.

But now I'm creaping up the first page for 'state health insurance' (state being the actual state he lives in) which gets 3600 exact match searches each month....currently at #5 this morning.

The 'problem' is, said family member is a solo insurance agent, a one man show and there is simply no way he can handle that much traffic, when the site hits the top for that term it'll be waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too much and it will just cause a flood of unanswered emails and voicemails.

Soooo....now I'm looking for ways to monetize that. I figure I'll leave his contact info up until he is to the point of overwhelm, then swap it out with ??????? until he can catch up.

I thought for a split second to use adsense, but only for that split second! The site itself is nice but I don't want adsense ppl looking too closely at the backlink profile and giving me grief once it starts making a lot of money.

So how to monetize insurance based traffic? Is there some sort of relevant, reputable CPA offer I can put up on the site? Or some other sort of advertising? Looking for any and all ideas.

Thanks

You need to contact local insurance agents and sell them leads for $$$ - way more than any CPA or advertising program will pay you. Insurance agents buy leads ALL the time and here is how it works:

Non-exclusive leads: Leads sold to up to 5 competing insurance agents in the area meaning like 1 State Farm, 1 Allstate, 1 Farmers, etc. - They sell them to up to 5 agents but not any two from the same company. These leads sell for $25.00 - $40.00 each depending on the type of insurance - annuity leads are most expensive.

Exclusive leads: Come in and go to ONE agent - these leads fetch up to $150 a pop depending on the type of insurance.

You need to be able to deliver the leads right away through email - like within a few hours after your online contact form is filled out - they need to be fresh and hot. Here's another tip - if you can presell them and really narrow down the lead - for example: life insurance lead, Male 35 Non-smoker, no meds, looking for $500K policy, then the price goes up.

This is an extremely lucrative business - there are lead aggregators that dominate the top of the search engines and rake in big cash from selling leads. Check out netquote!

THIS is a fucking awesome idea that I have been mulling over for a few weeks unsure of how exactly to put together the nuts and bolts of it all.

How long have you been working on the SEO for this website?

REALLY APPRECIATE YOUR TIME! This was very helpful, thank you charliebones. I'll have to start networking to find a local company that has a lot of employees and can handle the large influx of leads. I'll perhaps have a pow wow with my family member that this site was originally created for to see if he has any ideas/contacts that we could sell leads to, and cut him in on that action as well.

I'll go exclusive and simply set up some sort of instant automatic forwarding system that keeps track of the numbers. So they get it immediately and I keep track of how much I should get paid. I'll do this with both a type in contact form as well as one of those trackable calling phone numbers.

Thanks for the pricing as well, hot damn that looks good! Thanks for the tip on netquote as well. Again really appreciate your time.

charliebones said:

You need to contact local insurance agents and sell them leads for $$$ - way more than any CPA or advertising program will pay you. Insurance agents buy leads ALL the time and here is how it works:

Non-exclusive leads: Leads sold to up to 5 competing insurance agents in the area meaning like 1 State Farm, 1 Allstate, 1 Farmers, etc. - They sell them to up to 5 agents but not any two from the same company. These leads sell for $25.00 - $40.00 each depending on the type of insurance - annuity leads are most expensive.

Exclusive leads: Come in and go to ONE agent - these leads fetch up to $150 a pop depending on the type of insurance.

You need to be able to deliver the leads right away through email - like within a few hours after your online contact form is filled out - they need to be fresh and hot. Here's another tip - if you can presell them and really narrow down the lead - for example: life insurance lead, Male 35 Non-smoker, no meds, looking for $500K policy, then the price goes up.

This is an extremely lucrative business - there are lead aggregators that dominate the top of the search engines and rake in big cash from selling leads. Check out netquote!

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blackcontent said:

THIS is a fucking awesome idea that I have been mulling over for a few weeks unsure of how exactly to put together the nuts and bolts of it all.

How long have you been working on the SEO for this website?

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I'm not quite sure what you mean bud? The idea was simply to grab a dozen+ of targeted local leads my fam member could sell health and life insurance too, and perhaps cross sell the estate planning and other stuff he does. The site turned into a juggernaut starting to rank for serious kw though leading me to this post

As far as SEO, well I originally started it about a year or so ago but didn't put too many resources into it until a few months ago, plus I've grown exponentially better at seo the past few months.

You can always find a mailer that specializes in that field and can cut a revshare deal. Might be the fast and less time consuming way. If the quality is good he might pay you some decent cash upfront or you might not even want that if you see the revshare you are getting.
You could theoretically do this yourself through something like aweber, but I wouldn't recommend. Mailers that have experience with insurance offer usually know their shit.

killahbee said:

You can always find a mailer that specializes in that field and can cut a revshare deal. Might be the fast and less time consuming way. If the quality is good he might pay you some decent cash upfront or you might not even want that if you see the revshare you are getting.
You could theoretically do this yourself through something like aweber, but I wouldn't recommend. Mailers that have experience with insurance offer usually know their shit.

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Great,thanks...but I'm not sure what you mean by 'mailers' Newspaper or direct mail people or...?? What would a revshare deal look like for something like this?

Another way to monetize the site would be to sell some ad space to an agent or two, as well. Create some space on the sidebar or header to include an picture / logo / phone number for the agent, rent it to them for $xxx - $x,xxx per month.

Include them in the forwarding of the leads that are submitted, and you'll have a client for life!

GoogleAlchemist said:

Great,thanks...but I'm not sure what you mean by 'mailers' Newspaper or direct mail people or...?? What would a revshare deal look like for something like this?

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I meant e-mail. I would start at 50/50 but it is very possible that giving the mailer a slightly higher percentage could be worth it. It's tuff to say because your list sounds pretty small. Though if you tell your story and he believes you that the leads are exclusive, he might cut a lucrative deal for you. Key is fast (at least daily) delivery of those leads. Double Opt-In doesn't hurt either.


In any case though review your privacy policy if you want to sell the leads. Needless to say this is a touchy subject and that actually is your first hint for having found a decent mailer that knows his shit. He should ask you about your privacy policy ad/or about CAN SPAM compliance of those leads.
I am not saying there aren't any blackhat insurance mailers out there.

Yea you could sell those leads for 10 bucks a hit EASILY, I used to pay 25 bucks a pop for mine when I was slanging insurance. You could also contact other lead generation companies there are tons of them that sell to insurance agents, sign up for their affiliate program, your contact form turns into theirs and you get paid bank

a lot of good solid info on this thread.

Ok I see now,thanks. So this would be insurance companies that send out email followups to leads or is this more of an in between broker between me and the insurance companie? This may not be the way for me since your talking lists?

Then again you're also talking daily leads, so that would fit me...going on the average of 40-45% ctr for the top spot, this should land me with about 50 visitors each day, and I'll tweak onsite stuff to keep increasing conversions.

Now that things are really going forward with this, I'll have my lawyer look over my privacy policy and canspam stuff and just make sure everything else is in whatever compliance it needs to be for this sort of thing, appreciate that reminder.

killahbee said:

I meant e-mail. I would start at 50/50 but it is very possible that giving the mailer a slightly higher percentage could be worth it. It's tuff to say because your list sounds pretty small. Though if you tell your story and he believes you that the leads are exclusive, he might cut a lucrative deal for you. Key is fast (at least daily) delivery of those leads. Double Opt-In doesn't hurt either.


In any case though review your privacy policy if you want to sell the leads. Needless to say this is a touchy subject and that actually is your first hint for having found a decent mailer that knows his shit. He should ask you about your privacy policy ad/or about CAN SPAM compliance of those leads.
I am not saying there aren't any blackhat insurance mailers out there.

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Was that for health,life,car...?? What's the monthly/yearly/lifetime average value of the various insurance customers? I know I could ask my fam member in the biz but that always tends to lead into a hugely drawn out conversation about irrelevant, 'i know everything about everything' trivia shit I would rather avoid.

The lead gen companies seem to make the most sense, my background is affiliate marketing so it makes sense companies like this would have a setup like that.

AGman said:

Yea you could sell those leads for 10 bucks a hit EASILY, I used to pay 25 bucks a pop for mine when I was slanging insurance. You could also contact other lead generation companies there are tons of them that sell to insurance agents, sign up for their affiliate program, your contact form turns into theirs and you get paid bank

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HEHEHE, Don't take too much offense but, normally I really hate posts like this as I feel they dilute the thread for no reason but I'll refrain from a cyber slap due to your sig... your sig just blew my fucking mind, I love it. Kind of like 'there is no spoon'...yeah, great perspective!

Virus1 said:

a lot of good solid info on this thread.

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If the leads are really that valuable, then the selling of the leads should also just be temporary while he determines how much he needs to expand his staff to handle the average number of leads coming in from the top-ranking traffic. You work out a profit-sharing deal with him and both maximize bank. That would be the most lucrative long-term scenario, I would think.

GoogleAlchemist said:

Was that for health,life,car...?? What's the monthly/yearly/lifetime average value of the various insurance customers? I know I could ask my fam member in the biz but that always tends to lead into a hugely drawn out conversation about irrelevant, 'i know everything about everything' trivia shit I would rather avoid.

The lead gen companies seem to make the most sense, my background is affiliate marketing so it makes sense companies like this would have a setup like that.

Click to expand...

I can't really say and I don't think anyone will be able, too. Though the added value of ebing an insurance lead I would expect to be gone after so many days. Face it at one point the customer is going to or will have picked up his insurance, so those will turn into just "regular leads" to a certain extent.
Your family member probably knows best.

Regarding leadgen companies you will want to find companies that specialize in that area and preferably don't sell anything else except insurance leads.
Like described above they might just want to switch out your form with theirs and the money will be rolling in.
I can't really say where the starting point per lead might be. At least and this is the low end in my opinion 15$ per lead but after max a month renegotiate afer they were able to asses quality and press for a 25% - 70% increase.

Good luck

Sell the leads directly.

There is also an option to integrate surehits insurance offers. They pay per click usually in the $5 - $15 range and can display geo-targetted offers for the zip of the user. They are a better cpc alternative than adsense and are focused only on insurance traffic.

Good luck and hope you make some big buckaroos!

My family is insurance (we are 5th largest independent agent in our state) and has a similar strategy of getting leads through the internet.

Honestly I think you're throwing money away over the long term (or at least your family member is) because a client that he/she will get renewal commission from is better than giving up the lead for a 1 time payment.

I would suggest to your family member that he/she hire an (part-time) assistant; because he/she can make more that way, after all that is the reason you are able to sell the leads. As his leads scale up so should his business. I know life insurance and annuities insurance agents that make $250k/yr and now it runs on autopilot because those renewals are really where the money is in the insurance industry.

Basically what I'm saying in a nutshell is: Your family member would make a lot more in the long term if he/she can service those leads, rather than giving the lead up for a one-time fee; there is always more staff that he/she can hire (my family's agency has over 20 employees dedicated to servicing commercial, home and auto insurance).